Better to place SSD or HDD in optical drive caddy?

[dgl22]

I have a mid-2007 Macbook 2,1 and with a busted optical drive making terrible noises, I'm set to replace it with another drive. I've already bought the caddy and the SSD drive, but I'm not sure whether I should move my current HDD to the optical drive's spot or place the SSD there. From what I gather, I'm likely to get more speed and a smoother start-up if the SSD is in the original HDD spot, but I'm worried that the HDD won't be well protected in the optical drive caddy (since it won't have the original drive's motion protection). So my questions:

How essential is it to keep the HDD in that spot with the motion protection? Will it do fine without it?

Those that have put the SSD in the optical drive's spot, is your speed still significantly better? Are there any problems booting up from the optical drive's spot, or any problems with hibernation?

Thanks in advance.

 

[sbro25]

I was considering replacing my optical drive, but decided against it when I found a good deal on an SSD. I have a Macbook 4,1 and I wasn't even considering putting an SSD in the optical drive spot because if I remember correctly, it is a PATA connector. So at best, your older laptop is PATA, which I would not bother with.

What is the shock protection offered by the HDD bay? I assume it is some sort of accelerometer that parks the HDD when detecting a fall. Because there is not anything else there that caught my eye when I looked at it.

 

[soapsudz]

I had some issues with the computer going to sleep or hibernating when I had the SSD in the optical drive caddy - sometimes the computer would crash on sleeping and I would have to do a hard reset.

I swapped the SSD to the main bay, put my hard drive in the caddy, and haven't had any issues since. If you have a PATA caddy, you should put the hard drive there because you'll get much better performance with the SSD in the SATA bay.

The accelerometer sends a park command to the hard drive. I think it should work regardless of which bay the hard drive is in. Otherwise newer hard drives have protection sensors which can do this themselves.